by DailyDigest

Economy

On the political front, Rubino says, “The idea that things get more extreme from here is not that out of the ordinary and not that hard to believe. We are not just going to see gridlock here in the U.S., we are going to see chaos. That means of the things that should be gotten done, very few of them will be. . . . Political chaos is good for precious metals . . . both metals are way undervalued.”

Wall Street’s “bond king” and respected financial prognosticator Jeffrey Gundlach said in December that the Fed seems to be on a “suicide mission,” raising rates while the government deficit increases as a share of GDP. Normally when the deficit is expanding, the Fed would be lowering interest rates.

Fifteen years before Amazon’s HQ2 horserace, Elwood had won the retail lottery. “Nobody envisioned what we have out here,” said Jerry Heinrich, who sat on the board of the planning commission that first apportioned the land for development in the mid-1990s. “It was never anticipated that every major business entity would end up in the area.”

But while those nations could be conceived by many as “enemies” that could be forgiven for daring to question the hegemon, we must admit we were a little surprised at just how frank Bank of England Governor Mark Carney was during a lengthy Q&A this morning…

A false narrative is being presented in the mainstream on these circumstances – by both the media and central bankers. There has been a considerable amount of “jawboning” by economic authorities and mainstream analysts in an attempt to keep the public distracted from the economic crisis as well as keep the investment world engaged in trading with blinders on. With the propaganda going into overdrive, we must cut through the fog and mirrors, gauging the most important threats within the system and determining when they might escalate.

Marx’s salvation scheme was built on a mystical foundation supplied by German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Though the New York Times eulogy for Marx touted Hegel as an advocate of a “rational liberal state,” Hegel was derided in his lifetime as the “Royal Prussian Court Philosopher” and for promoting the notion that the State is “inherently rational.” Hegel deified government, asserting that “the State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth” and “all the worth which the human being possesses — all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.” Hegel scorned any limits on government power: “The State is the self-certain absolute mind which recognizes no authority but its own, which acknowledges no abstract rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, cunning and deceit.”

‘This means 238 posts must be filled with [black] Africans to take the current 128 filled posts to the target of 366. This implies that the 100 new posts must go to Africans in terms of the targets, else if there are no suitable Africans, the posts must be re-advertised.

Los Angeles is grappling with a homeless epidemic. “It’s the worst human catastrophe in America,” says Andy Bales, a pastor who runs the Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row. Faced with a growing crisis, city leaders last year budgeted more than $100 million for affordable housing, addiction treatment, job placement and mental health services. And yet, as L.A.’s real estate prices soar, so does the city’s homeless population. And nowhere have the twin forces of inaccessible housing and inequality created a more explosive mix than in Venice Beach, a hotbed of entertainment executives and talent where the median home price is $1.9 million. Many of these residents are now grappling with a quality-of-life issue that defies their own liberal ideals.

Already, Tibetan communities are dealing with the impacts of collapsing glaciers. In October 2018, debris dammed the Yarlung Tsangpo River, which forms the headwater of the Brahmaputra, threatening areas as far afield as Bangladesh with flooding.

Much of the heat has been stored in the ocean depths but measurements here only began in recent decades and existing estimates of the total heat the oceans have absorbed stretch back only to about 1950. The new work extends that back to 1871. Scientists have said that understanding past changes in ocean heat was critical for predicting the future impact of climate change.

Gold & Silver

Article suggestions for the Daily Digest can be sent to [email protected]. All suggestions are filtered by the Daily Digest team and preference is given to those that are in alignment with the message of the Crash Course and the “3 Es.”

Brandon Smith

I don’t know if Smith is right that the Fed is part of a larger plan (along with the BIS and other super banks) to intentionally crash the markets to create a big enough crisis to give them cover for their next step in world financial and political power domination. He believes they have a long term incremental plan that has been in the works for over a hundred years. But he has been right in predicting important US and world developments well in advance of their actual occurrences (though not perfect). There’s nothing better for validating a theory than accurate predictive power. Since about 2015 nothing has happened to disprove his basic thesis, though events are open to multiple interpretations. He has also been very much alone in his analysis, as opposed to simply synthesizing the views of others and calling it unique.
If Smith is basically correct, the super bankers and their lackeys are incredibly arrogant, evil and cynical (sociopaths, one and all). If he’s right, they are willing to cause untold human suffering and death for their own selfish goals. His thesis is so dark, not many are willing to contemplate it, even among audiences like PP.com and zerohedge. And I think that is true not because he doesn’t plausibly describe the structure of “the truth,” but because because considering his vision is like staring into the depths of Hell and seeing The Evil One staring back. No one except writers of science fiction and horror wants to consider that “they” are that evil and that close to implementing their evil plan.
But even if Smith is wrong and the super bankers are actually trying to help the world (“doing God’s work”), then they are doing such an incredibly bad job that a reasonable factual case can be made that they’re actually trying to destroy the world as we know it (along with billions of lives). You know you’re doing a really, really bad job if people can’t tell if you’re trying to help and save or trying to kill and destroy!!
Two of Smith’s sign posts I’m looking for once The Crash really gets going is for TPTB to move to a new global financial system to replace our current one. He’s expecting a new global fiat currency they control (something like the SDR, which would dethrone the USD as the reserve currency and all that would entail), along with a big leap toward one world government (something like the European Union for the whole world or as much as they can get). We’ll be in some seriously dark times if they succeed.
I hope he’s totally wrong or that they utterly fail if he’s basically right. If they succeed, the worst imaginings of the most pessimistic observers and post apocalyptic writers will not be dark enough.

CAF podcast

Investment advisor and former Assistant Secretary of Housing Catherine Austin Fitts says it looks like a “global recession is coming.” Is that going to cause the debt reset we’ve been hearing about for years? Fitts says, “Make no mistake about it, there is no reason for the federal government to default or monkey with any debt because they can literally print the currency. The question is how do they make sure whatever they are printing really holds any kind of store of value. I think the reason you are seeing them reengineer the federal bureaucracy and financial transactions infrastructure is because they want much greater and tighter control to do whatever they do, and that includes to continue to debase the currency. They could do this (reset) entirely by debasing the currency. . . . What we are watching . . . is essentially a coup. We had a financial coup, and now we are watching a legal coup to consolidate that financial coup. I would keep my eye on the fundamental governance structure of the U.S. The important thing is not what they do. The important thing is who controls no matter what they do. Now, we have created a mechanism for them to control entirely in secret and create policies entirely in secret, including around the back of a U.S. President. . . . It’s pirating by the ‘just do it’ method. I said to someone the other day, what is it about secret money for secret private armies that you don ‘t understand?”
$21 trillion in “missing money” at the DOD and HUD that was discovered by Dr. Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts in 2017 has now become a national security issue. The federal government is not talking or answering questions, even though the DOD recently failed its first ever audit. Fitts says, “This is basically an open running bailout. Under this structure, you can transfer assets out of the federal government into private ownership, and nobody will know and nobody can stop it. There is no oversight whatsoever. You can’t even know who is doing it. I’m telling you they just took the United States government, they just changed the governance model by accounting policy to a fascist government. If you are an investor, you don’t know who owns those assets, and there is no evidence that you do. . . . If the law says you have to produce audited financial statements and you refuse to do so for 20 years, and then when somebody calls you on it, you proceed to change the accounting laws that say you can now run secret books for all the agencies and over 100 related entities.”
In closing, Fitts says, “We cannot sit around and passively depend on a guy we elected President. The President cannot fix this. We need to fix this. . . . This is Main Street versus Wall Street. This is honest books versus dirty books. If you want the United States in 10 years to resemble anything what it looked like 20 years ago, you are going to have to do it, and there is no one else who can do it. You have to first get the intelligence to know what is happening.”https://usawatchdog.com/secret-money-for-private-armies-catherine-austin…

I could nit-pick a few things

I could nit-pick a few things in Smith’s article, but I believe the general thesis to be correct: The Fed is acting intentionally, according to a larger, long-term plan that ends in a (manufactured) crisis that will be used to implement a new monetary regime that further disadvantages the average person and tightens societal control.
I don’t think the goal is One World Government but rather Total World Control. There’s a difference. TPTB will let the people have their local (national) governments, and maybe even their local currencies. But the new central system will “de facto” control ALL of the currencies at that point, and then it matters not who makes the laws (to paraphrase Amschel Rothschild).
It may not happen in this crisis, but eventually, as part of a basket of solutions to some crisis, paper money will be banned “because it’s too easily counterfeited” (probably by Russians, oh my!). Then TPTB will finally have their all-electronic money system, where all transactions — and hence all of your social/political patterns — are trackable. It’s a win-win!
It drives me a bit buggy to hear all the hand-wringing over the supposed stupidity of the Fed. As Smith pointed out, studying their previous statements and history proves they know exactly what they are doing. It’s not political malfesance or management error, it’s calculation and manipulation towards and end.
Rethink the 2008 crisis as a well engineered crime. Leading up to it, the banks were making knowably dangerous investments, and making a crapload of money doing it. Then, predictably, enough of it went sideways to create a huge counterparty-risk crisis, which was supposedly unresolvable — though Elizabeth Warren later said that was a lie. Regardless, the solution was to give the fraudsters $700B from the treasury, and later, the Fed put $2.7T on the Big Banks’ ledgers (which really meant $27T in deployable capital). Inflation (which is much higher than official numbers) has eaten away at some of the value of those piles, but hey, when someone gives you enormous amounts of free money and you only get to keep part of it, it’s still a pretty damn good deal.
I may be a little off on the exact numbers here, but the principle of it is the key thing. We have to start looking at the financial and monetary systems not as ineptly run institutions but rather as highly sophisticated criminal enterprises.
mark

Brandon Smith

Is he still a climate change denier? Does he still ban people from his site who wish to discuss it? Does he still lie about those people’s motivations?
Once someone demonstrates basic dishonesty on one subject I tend to distrust him/her on other subjects too.

Orwellian

China is planning on rolling out a nationwide network where all their citizens are graded on a variety of metrics and given a “social credit score.” In this Bloomberg QuickTake video, they explain how it works, what it is, and the battle China is facing domestically with its own population.
For those that have low social credit scores, the video explains, “you could be denied basic services or stopped from borrowing money or it could end up restricting your employment opportunities.”

I know, right?

Doug wrote:

Is he still a climate change denier? Does he still ban people from his site who wish to discuss it? Does he still lie about those people’s motivations? Once someone demonstrates basic dishonesty on one subject I tend to distrust him/her on other subjects too.

I know, right?
It’s like someone puts full faith in complexity modeling at the very edges of human capability but then rejects such things as conservation of momentum, free fall, and basic physical chemistry revealing a perfect thermate fingerprint in crime scene residue.
Very hard to reconcile. I know right where you are coming from.

the truth about truth

NO ONE gets it completely right all the time.
Michael Ruppert used to point out that to be effective, propaganda needs to be 95% true. That is to say, the informational poison pill must be hidden in tasty piles of truth. Even when one is not intentionally propagandizing, there are always insufficiencies in one’s methodology for arriving at what they consider the truth, so they will never be 100% correct.
The point here is that many of us are trying our best to comprehend the tangled web of fact and fiction and define a credible narrative from it. Just because we can’t get it 100% right — and may be completely wrong on certain topics — does not mean our analysis on all other topics is worthless.
We should always be skeptics, of everyone always, and even of our own convictions. But everyone — even propagandists — will have it right sometimes. I too tend to discount a person’s opinions once I’ve heard them say something that to me seems indisputably wrong. But sometimes an analyst gets trapped in a wrong mindset on one issue but on other issues they are doing excellent analysis.
So, my advice is: discount, but don’t ignore.
Mark

can we judo-flip Newsguard?

I poked around in Newsguard’s web site. They’ve been clever enough to not include a list of who is green and who is red. You’d have to install their app to start seeing their ratings applied to search results and web pages. Not gonna do that.
From various reports, though, it sounds like outlets such as The Washington Post, New York Times, and Fox News all get green ratings. RT gets the expected red rating. (If anyone has a more comprehensive (and properly sourced) list of who is green and who is red, I’d be interested to see it.)
In the meantime, it occurred to me that there is a way to leverage what they’re doing over at Newsguard: Just get people to do the opposite of whatever they recommend. That is, avoid all the sites they label green, and seek out the sites they label red. Tell all your friends!
Tying this into the France discussion, internet information is one of TPTB’s pressure points. How can we use their own info-control systems to hurt them?
Mark

astonishing

i saw this video when it came out, it is still mind-boggling.

Nate wrote:

Investment advisor and former Assistant Secretary of Housing Catherine Austin Fitts says it looks like a “global recession is coming.” Is that going to cause the debt reset we’ve been hearing about for years? Fitts says, “Make no mistake about it, there is no reason for the federal government to default or monkey with any debt because they can literally print the currency. The question is how do they make sure whatever they are printing really holds any kind of store of value. I think the reason you are seeing them reengineer the federal bureaucracy and financial transactions infrastructure is because they want much greater and tighter control to do whatever they do, and that includes to continue to debase the currency. They could do this (reset) entirely by debasing the currency. . . . What we are watching . . . is essentially a coup. We had a financial coup, and now we are watching a legal coup to consolidate that financial coup. I would keep my eye on the fundamental governance structure of the U.S. The important thing is not what they do. The important thing is who controls no matter what they do. Now, we have created a mechanism for them to control entirely in secret and create policies entirely in secret, including around the back of a U.S. President. . . . It’s pirating by the ‘just do it’ method. I said to someone the other day, what is it about secret money for secret private armies that you don ‘t understand?”
$21 trillion in “missing money” at the DOD and HUD that was discovered by Dr. Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts in 2017 has now become a national security issue. The federal government is not talking or answering questions, even though the DOD recently failed its first ever audit. Fitts says, “This is basically an open running bailout. Under this structure, you can transfer assets out of the federal government into private ownership, and nobody will know and nobody can stop it. There is no oversight whatsoever. You can’t even know who is doing it. I’m telling you they just took the United States government, they just changed the governance model by accounting policy to a fascist government. If you are an investor, you don’t know who owns those assets, and there is no evidence that you do. . . . If the law says you have to produce audited financial statements and you refuse to do so for 20 years, and then when somebody calls you on it, you proceed to change the accounting laws that say you can now run secret books for all the agencies and over 100 related entities.”
In closing, Fitts says, “We cannot sit around and passively depend on a guy we elected President. The President cannot fix this. We need to fix this. . . . This is Main Street versus Wall Street. This is honest books versus dirty books. If you want the United States in 10 years to resemble anything what it looked like 20 years ago, you are going to have to do it, and there is no one else who can do it. You have to first get the intelligence to know what is happening.”https://usawatchdog.com/secret-money-for-private-armies-catherine-austin…

it’s astonishing that this isn’t getting more attention, neither is the missing $21 trillion.
$21 trillion, that’s the total debt that has been run up by all presidents and their administrations, since america was founded, combined.
the federal government has admitted to the missing $21 trillion, but they won’t talk about it, because it’s a matter of national security, supposedly.
CAF is right, FASAB 56 creates legal cover, not just for the $21 trillion that is already missing, but for however much more the deep state wants to run up the tab on the american taxpayers’ dime.
it is indeed a bottomless budget for private armies for endless war, and it’s particularly concerning in light of blackwater founder erik prince’s recent pitch for privatization of the afghanistan war:
(warning, WaPo = fake news):https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/erik-prince-in-ka…
this is the sort of treachery that would cause me to lose faith in the federal government, if i’d had any to begin with.
what is a us dollar bill worth, if we can’t account for expenditures and liabilities of the federal government?
what is a US treasury bill worth?
what does it mean to have a representative democracy, or an election, when unaccounted for funds are secretly being used by unelected persons, for unknown purposes?
FASAB 56:https://fas.org/sgp/news/2018/07/fasab-review.pdf

A Trillion Here. A Trillion There ...

reflector,
We should be paying more attention to what matters. Unfortunately, there are too many distractions that are easier to swallow and don’t leave that lump in your stomach.
Here’s an oldie but goodie. It’s a 3:09 minute CBS News video reporting on the peculiarities of the time. On September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld made a speech decrying $2.3 Trillion missing from the DOD. It sounded like he sincerely wanted to get to the bottom of the problem. Everything changed the next day. What a coinky dink. (Too bad all the DOD accounting data was stored and destroyed in the part of the Pentagon that got hit by the airplane missile. What a coinky dink.)

As CAF noted, the current missing amount is about $21 Trillion. About 28% of that amount ($5.9 Trillion) has been spent fighting the skirmishes in the sandbox post 9/11/2001. Other than a big bunch of money going to fund and grow the Military Industrial Complex, what have we achieved over there? More importantly, how can we ever get out of there? What excuse will we find to fund the M-I-C after that? Will they happily accept a cut in funding once peace erupts? Hmmm.
Oooh! Look at that cute video of a cat playing with a squirrel. Aaaah. I feel better now, don’t you?
Grover

there's still a of of stealing to do

I’ve followed Catherine Austin Fitts for a decade or so, and she says some important things that few others say. She also has a pedigree that few others have. When we get info from former insiders like Fitts and Paul Craig Roberts — not to mention all the whistlblowers — we should give that info higher-than-normal credibility.
As for the missing $21T: That’s just from DoD and HUD, and that’s just what they admit to. The number is probably higher. Add in all the other federal agencies, and the number could be MUCH higher. I have experience in the area of DoD finances at the lower levels, and I can tell you there is exactitude in the accounting at those levels. So, if $21T is missing, it’s not because of ledger errors or “government waste” — it was stolen.
Now add in the $27T or so that the Fed deployed to (the owners of) the big banks. That money is notional for now but will eventually be taken from us in two ways: (a) inflation and (b) assets that we have to sell at cut-rate prices to those with capital during the next engineered financial crisis. Think Greece, but in Western nations.
Overall, I’d guess that we’re talking about at least $50T that has been stolen. So far. That we know about. But wait–there’s more! As Andrew Gause is wont to say: “There’s a lot of stealing left to do.”
Fitts has warned repeatedly that “the US government is being run as a criminal enterprise.” I agree but feel the need to add the following: The government is not running the game, it is merely one of the operational fronts of a larger criminal enterprise. It is integrated with the banking cartel, the intelligence state, the corporate boards, and (some of) the US military higher-ups. The “revolving door” for political appointments is the HR mechanism that keeps the right players in key positions of government power, while the real power players direct the action quietly from the background.
If all that is really true — and I am quite convinced it is — then we have a much bigger problem than who gets elected.
Mark